


rudiment

by somethingdifferent



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Anonymous Sex, Canon Compliant, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Loss of Virginity, Mutual Masturbation, Pre-Canon, Rey is Nobody (Star Wars), Touch-Starved, Unsafe Sex, Virgin Ben Solo, Virgin Rey (Star Wars), bc of the force bond, force skype but the 90s version, is it a dream? is it real life? who's to say, jakku has no sex education, mention of future pregnancy, mention of menstruation, mention of pornography, retconning jj's retcon via pre-canon fic, sexual awakening, taking a lot of liberties with how the force works., technically canon compliant but can be read as an au, touch-averse rey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 03:27:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28681809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somethingdifferent/pseuds/somethingdifferent
Summary: On Jakku, Rey spends a lot of her time talking to nothing.Sometimes, the Nothing talks back.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 53
Kudos: 485





	rudiment

**Author's Note:**

> this is my second attempt at writing canonverse! thank you to [FRAK](https://twitter.com/AllFrak) for looking and encouraging and being a wonderful sounding board!!!

_ And all that we built. And all that we breathed. And all that we spilt, or pulled up like weeds— _

JOANNA NEWSOM

Rey can’t remember ever not feeling it. That—thing. Hum. A quavering, like the thrush of velvet-soft wings, only all the time, only always there. Right there, inside.

She doesn’t have the words for it, the vocabulary. Not in Basic at least, nor any of the other tongues she speaks, crude and guttural amalgamations from languages she doesn’t know the names of. It is beyond speech, the thing she carries within her. Beyond her own understanding.

In thirteen years, when she is nineteen, she will know what it is. She will call out to it by its name and pull it to her aching body.

But that is in thirteen years.

Now, she is six. And money has changed hands.

Rey is nine years old the first time she speaks to the thing. Eking out something that isn’t quite a life in the remains of a durasteel carcass, its monstrous ribcage offering up a space she calls her home, granting protection from the heat, the unforgiving sun. She has been alone for the past three years, taking care of her body as much as she will allow herself, breaking her back under the weight of scrap. Unkar Plutt teaches her to count, his voice harsh and low as he measures out meager portions that will not fill her stomach. Fractions: everything folding in on itself. If she is small enough, he does not notice her; if she does her job well, he says, maybe they will come back.

The first time she truly notices the sound, Rey has just found a broken-down speeder in the ruins of a ship. Her hands are unsteady, gutting the wires with childish imprecision. She doesn’t know how to fix things yet, but she is trying to learn. She has overheard some of the other scavengers contemplating the odds of her survival. The crueler ones make bets on how she’ll go; they are not afraid to bet heavy.

Calloused fingers dig, clawing nuts and bolts, peeling back dented layers of durasteel until her nails bend and crack. Every so often, something thrums in the back of her mind, pulling her gently to one wire, to another. Guiding her movements, growing stronger and fading as she needs it. Rey doesn’t know how she knows it—that the sound is teaching her, showing her _how_ —but she does.

Sure enough, after a few minutes the speeder is coughing and sputtering to life, vibrating warm under her hands. Just like new.

A smile tears across her face before she can stop it, splitting the cracks in her lips until they bleed.

“Thank you,” she mumbles to the guide inside her own head, uncaring of how foolish it must be. She doesn’t even mind that she must be going crazy. Her odds just got a little better.

Rey clambers onto the speeder, boots fitting into the magnet-attached net on the side so she can haul her legs over its back. For the first time in a long time, Rey makes it home before dark.

She is nine years old, and she can no longer remember her mother’s face.

But, maybe for the first time, she doesn’t feel so entirely alone.

The sound is there with her, too.

Plutt’s junker ship is a staple at Niima Outpost from the time Rey is thirteen. He doesn’t use it—too old, everyone says, obsolete tech—and it doesn’t make him any money. Its bay doors barely work enough to open; flying is out of the question. No one knows why he keeps it, or what it’s even worth. Sentimental value, maybe.

Rey doubts that. Plutt wouldn’t know sentiment if it kicked him in the teeth.

It’s unspoken that, despite how it does nothing but sit and rust and waste away under the Jakku sun, no one is allowed to touch that ship. 

But it is huge, and nearby, and Rey sprained her ankle when she fell from the hull of a TIE fighter wreck last week. Scraping by on a quarter portion every other day has kept her alive, but Rey knows it’s only a matter of time.

At fourteen, this is Rey’s whole life: a matter of time.

No one has been inside Plutt’s ship, not even the man himself; no one knows what treasures might be waiting, ready to be cracked open and sold for parts.

She wakes in the dead of night, taking only the essentials with her to Plutt’s chopshop, forgoing her noisy speeder altogether. Her feet ache from walking, her ankle twinging at every footfall. Her muscles shivering from restraint, tensing at the barest hint of sound.

It takes her the better part of an hour and at least a gallon of oil to ease the hinges of the bay door apart. The humming in her mind, the one that never goes away, seems to grow louder and louder with every squeaky movement of the door. It opens, slowly, surely, wider and wider, until, with an almighty groan, the edge of the hatch collapses to the ground.

Rey jumps at the booming echo, interrupting an instinctive yelp with a press of her palm to her mouth. Seconds pass as she waits, frozen, for that familiar, horrible voice to approach. To drag her by the hair back to her stead, to leave her there, starving, until she becomes too weak even to beg for food.

The silence stretches. The air cools. Stills.

Finally, with a shaking breath, assured no one has heard her trespassing, Rey looks up.

A yawning chasm cuts into the belly of the ship. 

Squeezing her palms closed around the jut of the entrance, she hauls herself into the darkness.

The beam of her flashlight scores the interior of the vessel. It’s dirty, rusting, outmoded: the rumors were true. Limping, Rey drags her body through the intersecting hallways, searching for scrap light enough to carry, valuable enough to earn her at least a couple portions. 

Stiff fingers fumble with her toolbelt when she comes to what must be the engine room. She crouches near the panels, preparing to strip away the plates of durasteel sheathing the internal mechanics. The ship won’t fly, but Rey is still reticent to truly excoriate its machinery. It’s one-of-a-kind, customized completely; it’d be a desecration to take it apart.

Besides: the sound wouldn’t like that. Even now, as close to quiet as it ever gets, it tugs on her. Trying to pull her nearer or further away, she can’t quite tell.

When her work is finished, pack weighed down with enough scrap to buy herself another week of survival, Rey straggles to her feet and starts toward the hatch, ready to leave the strange ship behind. Something inside her is brimming, almost frightened. She shouldn’t be here.

Or maybe—she _should_. Maybe she should stay forever. Maybe it belongs to her.

As she walks, the hum fidgets, brightens, glows—and suddenly Rey is standing in a doorway.

She blinks, gaping at the space spread out in front of her. The bed, neatly made, sheets settled with a thin layer with dust; the stool shifted underneath a desk that curves from the wall, stacks of paper— _real_ paper—shrouding its surface; a durasteel chest tucked in the corner, a simple rectangle of storage, out of the way. The only thing that gives away its owner is its size: small, cramped quarters, furniture set low to the ground. A doll on the pillow, a pilot in orange and white, that is somehow lifted into her hands. She stares at it, dumbstruck, turning it over and over between her palms.

A child’s bedroom.

_Mine._

The word crops up so suddenly, lashes into her consciousness so fast, Rey can hardly even tell if the thought belongs to her at all.

 _Mine,_ her voice barks, lower and sharper than usual, the shape of her accent strange and foreign, _mine._

Her fingers curl into the doll, clutching it tight, compressing the soft stuffing until it conforms to the mold of her fist.

_—mine—_

It must be, she thinks. It must belong to her.

Rey crams the doll into the pocket of her toolbelt, securing it to her waist as tightly as she can. She hoists her winnings for the night across her back, and leaves the ship as quickly and quietly as she came.

Everything inside her crushed. Tensing, coiled tight. Vibrating like the string of a hallikset long after the last note has drifted through the air.

Rey is always careful. Incaution can get you killed on Jakku; even minor injuries can become death sentences. After almost ten years spent fending for herself, she should know better.

She is reaching in the bowels of a shipwreck, her arm aching where it bends unnaturally straight. Straining her fingers, trying to get to the engine. It keeps slipping further and further out of reach, every brush of her hand sending it deeper away. With a hiss, she pulls back, her armbands catching a loose thread on the jagged opening. It’s mid-day; the sun hangs heavy in the endless sky. Beating down on the back of her neck. A groan, and her teeth are gripping the tip of the glove on her right hand. She wears them only sometimes, when she can’t avoid the sun as it bakes the durasteel hot enough to burn. But now, she tears it off, flinging it onto the sand behind, and she reaches her arm through the opening again, stretching further. This time, she makes contact, a strong enough grip.

A snarl of victory edges past her lips, lips curling as she wrenches it free.

After struggling back down the outside of the ship, certain to keep hold of her prize, tucked under one armpit. Rey rolls back onto the sand with a thump, swallowing past the eternal dryness in her throat. Her canteen is almost empty, and she’s hours from the outpost. A teenager now, nearly grown, she plays warden to her own body: she knows how to ration.

It’s the work of seconds, as carelessness always is. Just as long as it takes her to scramble to her feet, exhaling hard through her nostrils with the effort of dragging her body upright. A hand flies out to steady herself against the outer wall of the ship, the durasteel that’s been roasting for hours in the sun.

A startled cry wrests from her throat. Rey draws her hand back, body functioning on pure instinct, the ship engine part landing hard on the sand below her feet. It rolls a quarter of the way down the dune before its journey ends, suspended still from its own weight. Rey barely even registers that, distracted by the throbbing pain pulsing from her right hand.

Her palm is an angry scarlet, blisters bubbling under the soft surface of her skin. She hasn’t gotten burned in years, always so cautious, and she’d forgotten how much it hurts. Because it hurts. It _hurts_.

Tears of pain spring to her eyes, her lower lip suctioned between her teeth as she cradles her bare hand to her chest as delicately as a newborn. 

_Bacta patch._

All at once, Rey’s tears stop. She looks up and around, frantically searching for the source of the voice, her vision lighting on miles and miles of vast desert. The only movement is the slow wind that scatters dustings of sand along the dunes, the crawling, wavering lines of heat in the distance.

She steps forward, almost hesitant. “Hello?”

_It’s a burn. You need a bacta patch, or it’ll scar._

“Who are you?” she asks, with a tone that she thinks could imply strength. Secretly, something inside her is thrilling, growing more and more certain of who it must be. _Papa_.

But the voice, when it replies, sounds nothing like her father. Like what little she remembers of her father. The accent is strange, vowels the wrong shape. A man’s voice, still, but lower, deeper than the others she’s heard at Niima Outpost. When he speaks, it sounds like an accusation.

 _Nothing. I’m nothing. Who are_ you _?_

Her heart pounds. Maybe from disappointment.

Rey rolls her shoulders back, straightening her shoulders as best she can while still doting on her scarred palm. “I’m nobody,” she says.

 _Well, Nobody,_ the Nothing addresses her, as if it were her name. _You need a bacta patch._

Her throat tightens, her eyes prickling. “I don’t have one,” and then, before he can argue the point, goes on, “Not enough credits.”

A hum rolls through her, from one ear to the other. _Water, then._

“But I—” the words stick on her tongue like the ever-present grit of sand, “my canteen is—”

_Doesn’t it hurt?_

Her face crumples, scrunching up in pointed, deliberate fury. She stays stubbornly silent.

 _Some cold water._ The voice, the Nothing, is gentler now, soothing. Easing over her skin feather-light, tracing through her body. Despite the scorching heat, Rey feels a shiver run through her, cascade across the length of her spine. _It’ll help with the pain._

Then, as suddenly as it came, the voice is gone again, leaving behind the same quavering buzz in its place. But now, as she searches through the inside of herself, she can feel the tug, like the immutable pull of the wind across the sand. As if it were leading her in another direction, to something new.

With her uninjured hand, Rey grabs her canteen from her belt, unscrewing the lid hastily and dumping the rest of her water onto her still stinging hand, watching as it runs down between the bones of her fingers and drips, wasted, onto the eternally shifting ground under her feet.

The Nothing was right. It helps with the pain.

The staff is a later addition to her supplies, but it quickly becomes essential. Her menarche comes late, just when she’d begun to wonder if she’d bleed at all, when she is sixteen. It doesn’t take long for the other scavengers to notice her budding breasts, rounded hips, her cheeks losing some of their lingering baby fat. Men who once protected her, concerned for the well-being of an orphan child, begin to look at her differently, a strange and unsettling gleam in their eyes. They know she’s a woman now, and fair game. An older woman, another who has spent a lifetime and then some on Jakku, teaches her a few basic defense positions. She shows Rey what soft spots to aim for and how to use her teeth. It doesn’t take long for the world to educate her on the rest.

Once, a drifter manages to get as far as grabbing her ass; he pays for the slight with his hand.

The years pass, etched with a fine, sharp tool onto the durasteel wall of her ramshackle home. One day follows another, and another. She can go a week without speaking to anyone, her voice hoarse when she returns to the outpost, bartering Unkar for an extra half-portion here, negotiating with a fellow scavenger for more territory there. She can go even longer without touching.

She tells herself it’s something she doesn’t want, or need; sometimes she almost believes it.

And always, there is the thing that hums inside her. The sound. The Nothing.

After the first time, their conversations occur more frequently. If they could be called conversations—sometimes, it’s just his presence she senses: as if someone were sitting in the same room, breathing the same air. Noiseless, perhaps, but _there_.

Rey wonders if she might be going mad, like all the lifetime inhabitants of this waste do eventually. When her parents come to collect her, she thinks, they will wonder how she got to be so strange. And what a story she’ll have to tell them.

_You’re dropping your shoulder too soon. It’ll give you away._

Rey scowls, adjusting her footing. The roof isn’t too far from the ground, but a fall would still be likely to break a bone.

Her fingers flutter and twist on her staff. Sweat pours down her forehead, slicking into her lashes. “How could you even tell? Can you see me?”

 _No,_ he says bluntly. _I can just feel it. Feel you._

Rey doesn’t know anything about the Nothing. Not even if it’s a person; not even if it _exists_. She probably made it all up in her head, an imaginary friend for a lunatic seventeen-year-old nobody.

“You’re very annoying for a Nothing,” she relays, matter-of-fact.

What sounds almost like a laugh buzzes in her head. _Not the first time I’ve heard that. Square your shoulder, Nobody._

She does, grousing.

The staff slices through the air, slightly quicker this time, and lands with a thud that shakes the durasteel under her feet.

_See?_

Her eyes roll, lift to the purpling sky overhead. The corners of her lips twitch into something like a smile.

“Don’t get cocky.”

The nights are the worst thing. By necessity, Rey is a light sleeper, any rest she gets coming in fits and starts. As far out as she is from Niima Outpost, she can usually avoid anyone drifting through the area looking for trouble; everyone who etches out a life here already knows to leave her alone. When she wakes in the morning, it’s to sore fingers, joints pushed tight together, nails digging into the palms of her hands. Knees bent to her chest, arms tucked into her sides.

She dreams about a childhood she never had. Grass dewy and soft under the crush of her pale, pudgy fists. Running into a tall, curling building behind her friends, watching the bounce of their braids along the lines of their backs. The loving embrace of a droid made of wire and durasteel. Spinning a Jogan fruit in a slow circle above her head, held aloft by nothing but her own power. The voice that creeps in from the dark corners of her brain and calls to the inky black void in the center of her, dragging cold and cruel along the inside of her head. _My child, don’t you know already? They left you behind. They never loved you at all._

“Is it cold where you are?”

_Yes. How did you know?_

“I could feel it.”

_It’s hot on your planet._

“Yes.”

_You don’t leave._

“Yes.”

_Why not?_

“I’m waiting for someone.”

_Who?_

“None of your business.” She squints at the horizon, chewing her nightly reward into a fine paste that sticks to her molars like tacky glue. “Why do you think I’d make my imaginary friend go somewhere cold?”

_Why do you think I’d make my imaginary friend live somewhere so fucking hot?_

“I’m not imaginary, Nothing,” she points out, correctly.

_Neither am I, Nobody. Neither am I._

She first learned about sex from pornographic holovids years ago. Children at Niima Outpost are rare, parents rarer. No one ever cared enough to shield her from what it was, and maybe they were right not to. The men who play it in full view just outside of the market, where anyone can see, aren’t the kind of men she’s ever wanted to associate with anyway. There they stand, sometimes in a circle, pumping unsightly appendages jutting from between their legs. Crowing and hissing ugly, coarse words to each other about the woman in the transmission, _whore, cunt, fuckhole_. Once she knows what it is, she doesn’t pay it much attention; she doesn’t care, except to know how little she desires to be one of those empty-eyed women. They all are, in the videos that the men like best—empty-eyed. How they writhe. How they wail. Like they’re being stabbed.

By the time she is eighteen, she knows she will never let herself be one of them. Not for anybody. Not for anything.

Sometimes, though—every once in a while—when the sky has long since fallen into blackness, when she’s just on the edge between wakefulness and sleep, she feels _him_. Hears his voice drift, resonant and dark. It makes her stomach feel as if it’s broken into millions of tiny, flickering wings. It _swoops_.

“Are you human?”

_Yes. You?_

“Yes. How old are you?”

_Twenty-eight. Nearly. You?_

“Eighteen.”

_Oh, good._

“Why is that good?”

_I—I don’t know. Don’t listen to me._

“Would that I could, Nothing. I’m stuck with you.”

_Yeah, I guess you are._

“It’s your turn to ask a question.”

_Right. Right. Let me think for a second._

She never even tries to get rid of the sound. Or to figure out what it is, how it works, whether it’s a symptom of her failing sanity or not. For all she knows, on the other end of this string tying them together, the Nothing might be trying to figure it out—if he’s real. If, somewhere, he exists. Maybe he is trying to rid himself of her.

Or maybe not. Maybe he’s as alone as she is.

There are no seasons on Jakku. The heat is endless, ceaseless. It lifts only at night, when the sun sinks like a stone behind the horizon, leaving little behind but a blanket of stars, the swirl of wind across the sand.

On the thinly cushioned cot of her bed, Rey shivers from the chill and, for the first time, she reaches out first.

“Nothing?”

The sound of her voice is small in the cramped space, barely louder than a sigh.

After a moment, she hears him stir, as if waking from slumber. Sure enough, the tone that echoes in her head is groggy, raw.

_Yeah?_

“Is it night where you are?”

 _Yes._ He hesitates, clarifies. _Not really._

“Oh?”

_I’m on a ship. It’s on a sleep cycle at the moment. It’s never really night on here. Or, well. Maybe it’s night all the time, and it’s never really day._

Rey blinks, her mouth falling open. A ship. The Nothing is on a ship. It’s the most he’s ever told her. “An interesting conundrum,” she manages after a long moment.

_You’d think so. Mostly it fucks up my circadian rhythm._

A beat passes. Rey shifts to her side, eyes tracing the line of the sand dunes just outside of the open space where a door would be. If this were a house.

_Do you ever wonder why the force connected us like this?_

Her eyebrows tilt together. “‘The force’?” she repeats, the words landing unnaturally on her tongue.

_You don’t—you don’t know what that is, do you?_

She can sense it, his disappointment in her. It makes her chest feel like the hull of a Jakku shipwreck, caved in.

“I’m supposed to, right?” she bites out, fingers closing into fists under her chin. Anger rises in her, mixing with the confusion, muddying her thoughts. “I’m supposed to, and now you think I’m—that I’m—”

But then, as quickly as her fury climbs, it vanishes with his next words.

 _No._ The certainty is obvious in his tone, as hard and flinty as the slice of a knife through flesh.

Her heartbeat thuds in her ears, in the root of her throat.

 _I don’t think that—I would_ never _think that about you,_ he says.

He says, _I think you’re perfect._

Neither of them can control it. Whatever it is. Rey doesn’t know if she still thinks it’s imaginary, if it’s something her crazed mind conjured up out of nowhere to keep her company; if it is, her subconscious must be a glutton for punishment.

It comes and goes as it pleases, edging out in the middle of a conversation, sometimes in the middle of a word. It’s frustrating to both of them—she can sense it on his end, his exasperation at his inability to sway the connection.

She thinks that might mean that he wants to talk to her. That he wants to do it as much as he likes, whenever he likes.

Tonight, the connection flares to life when he’s touching himself.

It takes her a moment to realize what is happening. She feels it prickle through her limbs first, settle in her lower abdomen; she knows his sensations the way he’s often claimed to feel hers. Hears a moan, a whine in her ear, as if he were right beside her, panting breathless on the back of her neck.

_Oh—oh, fuck—_

The pit of her stomach pitches, drops deep. Her fingers curl into the sheets beside her hips.

Something too close to desire claws its way up, slicing through her to her throat.

She inhales sharp. She should say something, anything, let him know she can hear, but she stays quiet, frozen in place.

_Yes, fuck, yes—_

Her thighs slip against each other, rub together. The cloth of her leggings seems suddenly scratchy, too warm even in the cool of the night that settles around her body.

In the midst of the groans that echo inside her head, Rey lets out a sound that might be a whimper.

At once, he stops.

 _Are—are you there?_ His breathing is ragged, shredded to bits. _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t know—_

“Don’t stop.”

The words burst from her before she can stop them. They hang there, snaking through the line tethering them together.

The sound of him fades in, fades out. She can feel his muscles tense, a phantom sensation reverberating under her skin.

_Nobody?_

Her toes curl under her thin sheet. Knees cross in the direction of her opposite hips, legs squeezing together.

“Don’t stop,” she says again.

An exhale, shaky, trembles between them. If she could see his face—if she knew what he looked like—if he were _here_ —she’d catch the sigh in the space between her teeth.

She can feel it when he returns his hand to his cock. Her palms itch. He gasps.

Rey closes her eyes.

Her fingers twinge as she unties her hair from its ladder of knots: one, two, three. She has one mirror, a rusting, dirtied panel of glass, repurposed from an abandoned structure she found years ago, that she props against the wall beside her cot. There she stands as she undresses, stripping down to her cloth undergarments and arm wraps. She doesn’t know what _beautiful_ looks like; it isn’t a question she’s ever needed to answer. She wonders, now, what he would think if he saw the freckles scattered across her cheekbones, the sloping line of her waist beneath her breast band. If he would admire the musculature of her arms, her strong legs. If he’d like what he saw.

Rey makes a face at her reflection in the mirror and turns away, repulsed by her own vanity.

They don’t talk about it, even enough to acknowledge it. After the first time, he doesn’t hide when he pleasures himself—and he does again, and _again_ , more often than she thinks he had before. Like he’s given himself permission for it, now that he knows that she knows. Now that she’s listening.

It isn’t long before Rey grows sick of that. Before she reaches between her legs and strokes, slow, exploratory, acclimating to the landscape of her own body.

In her bed, laying half-naked on top of her sheets, she touches herself to the sound of her Nothing as he brings himself off.

Her fingers press up and inside her channel, coating with wetness. She wiggles them, feeling around the bumpy, soft heat; where he’d bury his cock, if he were here. If he were with her.

The inside of her head fills with the sound of his pleasure; her vocal chords scrape out her own, letting it linger in the air above her.

 _Are you going to come for me?_ he asks her, in a tone strained with the effort of holding himself back. She can feel something building inside her, boiling to the surface.

Her hips rock into her hand, the heel of her palm glancing against her pelvis. Parting the slick wet seam of her body open.

She swallows hard around the dryness in her throat, her exhale a mewl. “Come?”

 _Finish,_ he explains, halfway-breathless. _Orgasm. Have you before?_

“I—I don’t know.”

_You haven’t._

Her nose scrunches in irritation, even as her thighs tremble, stomach muscles pulsating to the rhythm of her fingers. She pulls them back out, feverish, and rubs across the nub at her apex, the little bud that can make her whole body shiver. “How would you know that?”

_You’d know it if you had._

A frown tugs at the corners of her lips. Rey glares up at the ceiling, ignoring the evidence of her embarrassment smarting under her eyelids. “Fine. I haven’t. So what?”

_It’s not a bad thing. I can—_

He pauses. She knows it, his indecision. And there, just underneath that, the coil of his need. How it matches her own.

Her heart thuds unnaturally quick. “What?”

 _I can help you. Just—just—_ The Nothing hesitates, briefly, before barrelling ahead, voice scratching soft, aching. _Just pretend I’m there. With you. Touching you._

She can barely hear him for the blood roaring in her ears. Her pace slows, her breath with it. Quietly, feeling almost drugged, she hears herself ask him, “What would you do?”

A groan pushes from his end of the connection, guttural. It sends a tremor through her, the shudder of the wind before a sandstorm. _Kiss you._

She nearly laughs, the sound watery and high. She doesn’t know if she’s ever seen a kiss. Not one she hasn’t imagined, anyway. “That’s all?”

His voice drops, coarse with lust, raw with need.

_Hold you._

Something hitches in her throat, some deep want planting its roots.

Her fingers move faster, press harder. Tracing torturous circles. Rey bites her lip, brow furrowed as her eyes screw shut. She focuses on him, on his voice drifting through her mind, blocking out the knowledge of anything else. Anyone else.

 _Taste your cunt,_ he grits out. _Lick you up._

Her spine arches up, heels skidding across the foot of her bed.

_Fuck you._

Rey moans, the noise cracking into pieces. Her arm lifts, wrist pressing hard against her open mouth.

_Make you mine._

“Please,” she manages, hardly even sure what it is she’s asking for, only knowing that he can give it, that she wants him to give it, “please.”

 _Are you going to come for me?_ His breath hitches, and she can tell he’s close, too, that he wants her to finish almost as much as he wants it himself, maybe more. _Sweetheart, please, I need you to—_

“Yes,” she whines, tears pooling in the corners of her eyes, “yes—”

He groans, loud, drawn-out, and she feels it roll all the way through her body like a tornado, ruinous. The tension in her stomach winds tight, and, just like that—

_Come for me—_

—it snaps.

Rey comes for the first time with a hoarse cry, the sound muffled by her forearm. Her hips roll, instinct seeking out every last pulse of pleasure from her frenzied fingers. Distantly, she registers his panting, gasping release, his voice splintering into fragments sharp enough to cut.

Her chest rises erratically as she relaxes, her breathing catching on the dryness in her throat. Sweat cools on her skin, nipples pebbling at the sudden chill. 

Her hand drops back to her side, joints twinging from new and over-use. Her fingers close into a fist, stretch open again.

The backs of her knuckles graze bare skin.

Rey’s eyes pop open.

Her gaze is drawn down her arm, resting flat next to her naked hip. The sheets are rumpled, and fluffier and darker than usual. There, beside her, is a hand that doesn’t belong to her.

Pale skin dusted with moles, fingers huge and thick, palms the size of plates. The hand slopes into a wrist, leads into a forearm dense with muscle, roped with thick veins. Her eyes trail up, higher and higher, head turning to follow the line of his body: forearm, elbow, torso, shoulder, the soft curl of black hair—

Rey blinks, a gasp tugged loose from her chest.

When she opens her eyes, he’s gone.

They hardly go more than a week without speaking, now. It grows stronger, the thing tying them. Rey can feel it the way she can feel the sun scorching the earth around her.

It paws at the ground, anxious to be set free.

She’s sleeping. She thinks she might be sleeping.

In her dream, she’s naked, surrounded on all sides with satin and feather. Warm. Limbs relaxed like she’d never allow. Behind her, a body curves around hers, big, rough hands sliding up the smooth skin of her waist, groping her bare breasts. She makes a sound, a quiet _mmph_ of pleasure, when his broad fingers roll her nipples between them, pinching gently.

His hands shift, slip down, hooking in the hollows of her hip bones, pulling her into the dip of his lap. She feels hardness between them, hears his grunt of pleasure. She sighs, lashes fluttering.

_Soft. You’re so soft._

She isn’t; she’s a creature of muscle and bone, flinty and hard-edged as the blunt tip of her staff. But when he says it, it sounds true.

When he says it, she wants it to be true.

Rey stirs in his grip, rubbing her cheek against the silky pillow. He’s solid, muscled, skin hot; his fingers curl under her chin, snatching tendrils of her hair, left loose in her rest.

“Is this real?” she hears herself mumble, in a voice that lilts too high and delicate, embarrassing in its sincerity.

His arms tighten around her. But he doesn’t say a word.

Rey is nineteen. She’s never been off-planet, never even been away from the spit of land where her parents left her more than a decade ago. She’s waiting for someone to find her. She’s been waiting for it for her entire life.

He will. In three days.

Her fingers grasp the sheets, dirtied with sand and grit. Underneath her hips, her shabby pillow presses on her cunt. She grinds against it, thighs clenching, squeezing pleasure from her body with uneven, inexpert strokes. With her free hand, she reaches back, pumping a finger inside her channel, pushing back against her knuckles with a slick, wet thrust.

A moan leaves her, bruises her throat.

Inside her head, he groans.

 _I can hear you. Fuck, I can_ hear _you._

“Touch yourself,” she murmurs, rhythm faltering at the sound of his gasping, pleading moans. She pulls her soaked fingers out of her body, returning the heels of both palms to dig into the mattress, struggling for better leverage. “Touch yourself for me.”

A beat. An unsteady grunt. He obeys.

 _Sweetheart._ A shiver wrenches through her, ripples up her spine. Her pace picks up, her breath stuttering. _Oh, god. I want—I wish you were here._

“Me too,” she whimpers, “me too.”

Her back bows, arches, bare tits grazing the mattress, hips lifted as she rocks back and—

And—

A forearm curls all the way across her lower abdomen. A hand gripping her waist on the other side.

The backs of her thighs meet his pelvis. His cock, hard iron sheathed in velvet-soft skin, brushes the nub at her center. Fingertips skim the soaking, tender heat of her as he angles the head of his cock to her entrance. As he plies her open.

His other hand plants beside hers on the bed, thumb grazing her pinky.

He takes one inch. Another.

Rey sobs, burrowing her face in the sheets as he slowly notches himself inside her obliging body.

No one has ever touched her before. Like this. Anywhere. Everywhere.

Behind her, he is trembling as he eases his cock through her wet warmth. 

_F-fuck. Oh, fuck._

“Please—” she’s pleading for nothing again, for _her_ Nothing, coaxing him further inside her cunt, “please, please—”

Rey winces, letting out a strangled whine when he thrusts too deep, too fast, just as unpracticed as her. His hand tightens on her hip, his other fisting the sheets beside her head.

He’s frozen in place, sunk to the hilt inside of her. His breath hot on the back of her neck, chest a weight across her back.

 _You feel so good,_ he whispers, wild, hushed, _feel so good, so good—_

She only moves the slightest bit. Tilts forward, nudges back, spearing herself down his length.

He inhales, the sound sudden, almost pained. Taking a chance, she tries it again, moving a little further away, taking a little more on the way back.

 _Fuck,_ he hisses, the word rent to pieces. _Fuck, sweetheart, that’s perfect. You’re perfect._

Her head lolls forward, eyelashes flickering. “Oh,” she sighs, “ _oh._ ”

_Yes. Just like that._

She fucks herself back on his cock, careful, tentative shifts of her hips, splitting herself open along his shaft. Her cunt stretches sore, deliciously wide, drenching him, the mattress bending beneath them. When he finally moves again, skewering her apart with a deliberate, brutal shove, Rey _keens_ , loud. The noise repeats itself against the durasteel walls, waxing bright and vivid inside her own head, echoing between them. She realizes, distantly, that she is hearing herself as he hears her; that he is inside of her in every way.

_I wanted you so much, so badly, I wish—I want—I want—_

They’re clumsy with each other, desperate and graceless. He pounds into her too harshly, frenzied, fingers digging bruises into her flesh. Rey is hardly any better; she claws her bedsheet to ribbons, writhing under his body frantically, straining for her release. She bucks against him, dazed in longing, thinking only of his voice in her ear, his mouth open and wet on her shoulder. And she wants, too.

When she comes with a hoarse cry, pulsing tight, it drags him over the edge with her. His cock sinks deep inside her cunt, his movements jerky, limbs spasming—and then finally, he groans and throbs and spills himself, hot and wet, in her cunt. Buried so deep inside her body it seems like he wants to stay there forever. 

In sleep, Rey can feel him crooked around her, sharing the heat of his body like it belongs to her too. With her eyes closed, it’s easier to pretend that he’s really there.

She dreams about a sword that bursts into flames. When she wakes, the sun is slanting across her mattress, the sparse wind sifting through the open slats of her stead. And she is alone.

“Where are you?”

_What?_

“What’s your name?”

_Wh—why are you asking me this?_

“Because I want to know. Know you.”

_Why are you asking me this now?_

“Because I want—I thought you—”

_What makes you think you’d want to know me? What makes you think I’m—that I’d be good enough to—that I am—_

Her breath catches, tugs. Her fingernails carve moons in the skin of her palms.

For a moment, they are noiseless. Silent as the desert that surrounds her, as the void of space he is drifting through, right now, somewhere.

And his voice, when it comes, breaks whatever is left of her heart.

_What makes you think any of this is even real?_

It doesn’t matter, she decides. The Nothing, whatever and wherever it is, isn’t anywhere close to Jakku. Maybe doesn’t even exist—was cooked up by her half-crazed mind, a pretty lie to make her feel less—to make her not so—

And she can’t leave. She can’t. It was foolish of her to even consider it.

They still haven’t come to get her yet.

Rey is nineteen. All sinew, unassuming strength, teeth cut on the cruelty of her home. She is hungry. Has been hungry. 

In a few years, when she is in the home on Naboo, her jaw will be softer, her belly round under the white slip of a nightgown she wears in the morning. She will sleep well—except for the times that the baby keeps her awake—wrapped in the embrace of her husband. She won’t be hungry anymore. Or alone. Not ever again.

But that is in a few years.

Now, she is colder than she’s ever been before, shivering wet from the storm that rages around her. She sits in a hut on Ahch-To, layered under the shawl he held out, that he let her wrap around her thin shoulders. She reaches out her hand for his.

After a moment, Ben takes it.


End file.
